Came across an interesting article while browsing the net for Tata-JLo (!) deal yesterday. Pankaj Ghemawat, a chaired professor at Harvard Business School disagrees with Tom Friedman that globalization has reached its peak but instead believes that a lot of trade, immigration as well as “bits” travel only within national boundaries, and there is still a long way to go before we can knock down the walls we have built over centuries.

The findings fly in the face of Friedman’s famous work. Take flows of people. Much as we would like to believe that this figure would be astronomically high, it is not. Says Ghemawat, “If you look at the stock of first-generation immigrants divided by the total population of the world, it is barely 2.9%.”

In fact, he claims that in some metrics, we are just about reaching the 19th century level of globalization:

“On the people’s side, the current ratio of immigrants to world population is slightly lower than in 1910. On the FDI side, we have probably reached new heights, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that we got back to the FDI-to-GDP ratio that the world was seeing in 1901,” says Ghemawat.

I can imagine this happening because of the FDI from Britain, France, and Spain into their colonies (which had been quite impoverished by then by monies being sent back as profits). A lot of flow today is in the reverse, the Tata-JLo deal being a case in point. It would be interesting to see detailed numbers, or perhaps they are present in the book.

In fact, at some point, I thought the claim that there is actually increasing localization of products which goes against globalization was being made. For instance, Coke and Wal-Mart and McDonalds have to take local tastes into account. I wonder if this would count as a case of more globalization or less globalization. I guess parts of it can be argued either way.